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| Real Voice and Bad Writing |
As I've been trying to work and rework my thoughts about voice these last four years, I have been nervous about the charge that what I am calling "real voice" is just writing that happens to tickle my feelings or my unconscious concerns and has nothing to do with the words' relationship to the writer. The charge is plausible: if I experience resonance, surely it's more likely to reflect a good fit between the words and my self than a good fit between the words and the writer's self; after all, my self is right here, in contact with
As I've been trying to work and rework my thoughts about voice these last four years, I have been nervous about the charge that what I am calling "real voice" is just writing that happens to tickle my feelings or my unconscious concerns and has nothing to do with the words' relationship to the writer. The charge is plausible: if I experience resonance, surely it's more likely to reflect a good fit between the words and my self than a good fit between the words and the writer's self; after all, my self is right here, in contact with the words on the page, while the writer's self is nowhere to be found. Needless to say, I cannot disprove the charge. But I'm not trying to prove that I am right, only to persuade you to adopt a hypothesis -- to see if it clarifies your experience of reading and helps you strengthen your writing. But the charge also made me nervous because I wondered if it showed that my taste is peculiar and defective. The passages I instinctively picked out in a piece of writing were seldom the most skilled or competent writing there; sometimes they were down right terrible. Yet they did in truth appeal to me. And I often get people to do freewriting or I give people exercises in which they turn out careless, excessive, or self-indulgent writing, and I occasionally enjoy reading some of it. And it's true I hate writing that is merely competent. Could it be that I have a peculiar itch for badness? My theory of voice helps me trust my own taste and deal with the accusation that I don't care about quality. I now see that caring about quality has two different meanings and springs from two different temperamental approaches to writing. On the one hand caring about quality implies a hunger to stamp out terrible writing. A hunger to destroy defects, failure, excess, and ugliness. I don't have this hunger. I am content to let people write much that is bad. I try to let myself write badly too. On the other hand, caring about quality implies hungering for excellence, wanting the real thing, not settling for mere adequacy. That's me. I want the moon. I insist it is attainable: writing that someone would actually want to read by choice, not just for pay or for a favor. The reason I don't mind badness is that I sense how necessary it is if you want to get beyond mere inoffensive writing to something actually worth a reader's time. I believe it is helpful to develop a taste for real voice because it will not only support your hunger for good writing -- your secret feeling that of course you and everyone else can write with power -- but it will also help you to be more accepting of the terrible writing it is usually necessary to produce if you want that power. For the point is that even though real voice brings excellent writing when it is fully developed and under control, it often leads to terrible writing when it is only just emerging and not yet under control. Your most fluent and skillful voice is usually your acceptable voice -- the voice you develop as you work out an acceptable self. To get it, you probably had to push away feelings, experiences, and tones of voice that felt unacceptable. But these unacceptable elements have energy and power tied up in them that you need to tap if you want to deepen the reasonance of your voice. Yet, of course, you are likely to hate these sounds: you have trained yourself to shove them away, you use considerable energy in doing so, they are part of your anti-self. When, then, you allow yourself to start using some of these feelings, experiences, and tones of voice in your writing, there is little chance you will be able to use them in a controlled and effective way. Bad writing is almost inevitable. I am implying, in effect, a roughly Freudian or depth psychology model of a murkey unconscious pool full of powerful, threatening energy. But there is also a less lurid model that underlines what I'm saying about voice -- roughly Piagetian: that the attainment of real voice is a matter of growth and development rather than mere learning. In attaining a new stage of development, you move from one mode of functioning to a more complex, sophisticated mode. In the process, skills can fall apart. There are lots of things you did well with that old mode which you now bungle. * A genuine restructuring requires a destructuring. I think I see this happening in writing: many students don't seem to get past certain levels of adequate writing without going through a stage with lots of deteriorated writing. In short, fear of badness is probably what holds people back most from developing power in writing. Some of that fear is natural in the struggle to develop an acceptable self. But some of it results from teachers who care more about getting rid of badness than about looking for potential excellence. If you care too much about avoiding bad writing, you will be too cautious, too afraid to relinquish control. This may lead to the worst fate that can befall a writer -- feedback like this: "It seems pretty good; I liked it fairly well; I can't see anything the matter." What they are really telling you is that they were absolutely unaffected by your words. If, on the other hand, you really seek excellence, if you seek to write things that others might actually want to read, you need to stop playing it safe: go for it, take the plunge, jump over the edge. You won't know where you are going. You will write much that is terrible. It will feel like a much longer path to tread than if you just want to get rid of badness. But you will get rewards. You will get lots of feedback and it will be interesting. People will hate some of what you write and love other parts; some people will love what others hate. If you can put up with all these things, especially the inevitable flops, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that ____________________
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